Page 26

“Where are you now?”

“Still here. Looks like they’re waiting for company.”

“Address?”

Grisha gives me the address, and I end the call, standing in the walk-in until I can trust my face.

Daniel Reed sat across from my attacker and sold him pictures of my coat in her doorway. This is personal, and it scares me more than anything else ever has.

Through the open door, I can hear Vera at the counter telling a little girl that the pink macarons are the best ones.

I pick up the eggs and carry them out to her.

“Got to go.” I kiss her cheek, and I know she watches me walk out the front door even though I can’t see her.

I break laws driving to the diner. When I get there, I spot Grisha through the front window, sitting at the counter like he said, and at the back of the diner, in a family-sized booth, Daniel Reed and Zorin’s foreman, and it feels like the universe is on my side today.

I walk through the door, and Reed spots me first.

One hand over the envelope in his jacket, he bolts toward the back of the diner like he just heard a starter pistol. The tall guy’s eyes meet mine, and he rises casually, before shoving the table into the aisle complete with coffee cups, cutlery, and condiments.

I hurdle the table legs as he disappears through a door marked STAFF ONLY. Pain flares in my side, and I blank it out. They’re running for a reason, and that reason involves Vera, and I’ll deal with the fallout from Yevgeny later.

I crash through the door and into a narrow hallway, the busy kitchen on my left, a restroom on my right. The door at the far end must lead outside, and as it swings shut, I already know that I’ve lost them. Out the back of the diner, a mini dumpster filled to overflowing with black sacks takes up most of the yard.

Grisha arrives along the alleyway, panting. He didn’t pass them along the way.

But now I know for certain why Daniel Reed is back.

Rosa’s is closed on Mondays. It’s the only morning of the week Vera doesn’t set an alarm, and she has told me twice, seriously, that on Sunday nights she doesn’t get up for anyone.

On Sunday night, she puts Rosa in the cab at the curb, comes back inside, locks the door, and turns off the counter lights one by one until the shop is dark.

In the staff room, the alarm keypad glows red beside the back door. She presses STAY, then unlocks the narrow door to the stairs. She holds out her hand, and I take it, filing Daniel Reed and Zorin’s foreman away in a secure compartment inside my head for later. Upstairs, she doesn’t turn on the lamp. The streetlight comes through the curtain in a long pale stripe across the quilt on her bed.

She turns to face me, and I tug her hair free of its pins. Her eyes meet mine, pupils blown wide, the tiny heart shape living in the center of her mouth where her lips don’t quite meet sending pulses of want straight to my loins.

“Nikolai, are you–”

I silence her question with a kiss, slow and deep, exploring her mouth with my tongue. “Tonight is all about you, Vera.”

I unbutton her shirt and slide it over her shoulders while she watches me so intently I feel the burn in my own cheeks. My fingers drag across her bare skin, and my pulse accelerates when goose bumps appear on her arms. I unfasten her bra, licking her earlobe as I do so, and add it to the crumpled shirt on the rug beside the bed.

Her trousers are next. Vera hasn’t moved, but her breaths are coming faster than before, and her skin is flushed despite the coolness in the air.

When she is standing in front of me, wearing only plain white cotton panties, I kneel in front of her, fully clothed.

“You’re beautiful, pchelka.”

Her arms instinctively move across her body, and I catch her wrists, holding them behind her back with one hand.

“Let me see every part of you.”

“I think you already have.” Her voice is husky, and it sends the blood directly to my loins where my erection is already throbbing inside my pants.

“Tonight is different.”

She sucks in a small breath. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”